I would say the root cause of the DB issues is rather the failed attempt to privatise it, which caused years decades of infrastructure underinvestment to cook the books to make it look more attractive to private investors.
But of course the strong car lobby also played a role in that.
This is the main reason. While the car lobby is no doubt dangerously powerful they are also heavily dependant on the cargo department of DB. A massive amount of industrial commodities is moved by the railway network and not the ubiquitous trucks. If they worked to defund the railway infrastructure they would eventually hurt their own supply lines.
Yes, hence me saying “failed”. They cooked the books because they wanted to put it up for sale on the stock market, but in the end that never happend for a lot of different reasons.
They cooked the books, but not for potential investors. At least not in the last two decades.
But they are organised as and run like a private company and driven purely by short term profits and will pay big time bonuses to their executives (usually ex polititians) every year.
Yes, the point I was trying to make was not that being owned by the state makes it work better: in fact I think it is absurd that it is a “for profit” company which has no incentive to make profit as it’s owner will never hold them accountable by letting them go bankrupt, as that is not an option. We have the worst of both worlds, almost as if public necessities (“Daseinsvorsorge”) and natural monopolies do not make sense to run “privately”…
